Month: April 2016

What is the “vice” in “vice president”?

In what many are calling a last-ditch effort to shake up the campaign, this week Ted Cruz announced former Republican presidential candidate and Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential nominee should he win his party’s nomination.

For many, Cruz’s pick is raising lots of questions, given that it’s now mathematically impossible for him to win the nomination outright. But there’s one big question whose answer I’d really like to know: What is the vice in vice president?

The many virtues of vice   

We often poke fun of the second-place office, but the vice presidency is an important one: It’s a heartbeat away from the presidency, as candidates consider when vetting their running mates.

The etymology of the title bears out the importance of the vice presidency: in Latin, vice means “in place of” or “in succession to.” For example, when the president sends the second-in-command to an important state function, the vice president is standing in place of – representing – the president at the event.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) first cites vice-president in 1574, when “Sergius the Vice-president of Asia” must have really balanced out the ticket. This vice- technically functions as a prefix; the U.S. Constitution’s use of Vice President may obscure vice’s original grammatical role. The abbreviation V.P. is cited by 1887, the colloquial veep by 1949.

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A screenshot of the first appearance of “Vice President” in the U.S. Constitution, in Article I, Section 3.

The earliest vice the OED finds is vice-collector, which it dates to 1497. (And you thought substitute teachers had it bad. Good thing we don’t call them “vice-teachers.”) The prefix proliferated in the 17th and 18th centuries, titling the likes of vice-apostle, vice-butler, vice-Christ, vice-husband, and vice-viceroy. A vice-viceroy was an official serving in place of the viceroy, who served in place of the monarch (French roi, “king”) in a colony, for instance. Old French at one point rendered Latin’s vice as vis-, which survives in English’s phonetically challenging viscount.

Latin’s vice is a form (the ablative case) of the noun vicis, which meant a “change,” “turn,” “succession,” or “place,” hence vice’s “in place of.” The word also appears in the adverbial phrase vice versa, a construction (the ablative absolute) literally meaning “the place having been turned.”

A vicar originally served in place of a parish priest. Parents live vicariously through their children’s endeavors. The vicissitudes of life are its constant and unpredictable changes. All of these words feature, at root, Latin’s vicis.

After Cruz made news with his pick for Number Two, many, like former Speaker John Boehner, have attacked Cruz’ vices. Others, meanwhile, think Carly Fiorina will bring out Trump’s own vices – and viciously bring it to the frontrunner. This vice, and its adjective, vicious, are not related. The root is Latin’s vitium, a “fault,” “defect,” or “offense,” source of the verb vitiate.

Changing vice’s ways

Vicis has some notable Germanic cousins. They demonstrate quite the change, for English owes both week and weak to a common, Indo-European ancestor shared with vicis.

Week is from Old English’s wiecan, whose various Germanic cognates meaning “office” and “function” may point back to some sort of ritual “changing over” of duties after the period of a week. The seven-day week is found in ancient Mesopotamian cultures, though its modern iteration is owed to Jewish tradition; some think of the Sabbath as marking the “turning” period in the week.

Old English had wác, which corresponded to the Old Norse form that eventually yielded weak, going strong in spite of meaning “having deficient strength” since the 1300s. One of the early usages of weak actually meant “bending,” due to lack of strength. Indo-European linguists propose a Proto-Indo-European root of *weik-, meaning “bend.” (The cognate wicker preserves this sense in its bent benches.) Something that bends is not sturdy, stiff, or strong. When you bend something, you change it.

Cruz’s vice presidential announcement may ultimately signal the weakness of his presidential prospects now, but one thing is for sure: the senator certainly doesn’t seem to be bending before the Republican convention this summer, as he wants no one in place of him in the Oval Office.

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Purple‘s etymological reign

After Prince’s sudden death last week, we saw an outpouring of grief, memories, tributes, retrospectives, and purple, the artist’s iconic color. While nobody wore purple like Prince did, the English language has long been sporting the hue.

Purple

The English purple is actually a variation on an earlier form, purpure. Those double r’s can be tricky to say, so, in a process called dissimilation, English speakers transformed the second r into l, a related sound.

Purple and purpure are both found in Old English, when they first referred to purple garments. The color historically shaded towards a dark red, such as crimson, and bedecked emperors, kings, senators, and, at one point, cardinals. Purple long signaled power. But by the 15th century, purple sheds its clothes – and status – to name the color as such.

English borrowed purpure both from French and directly from Latin, which had purpura. Like English’s purple, this purpura meant “purple garment” and the color “purple,” but it also signified “purple dye.” For, as the Oxford English Dictionary paints it, purple was fundamentally a pigment “obtained from the hypobranchial gland of various gastropod molluscs found in the Mediterranean.” Or sea snails.

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A fittingly elaborate shell of species of Murex, the genus name of sea snails from which Tyrian purple was obtained. If you hold it to your ear, they say, you’ll hear an “ocean of violets in bloom.” Image by Kate Childers on www.freeimages.com.

The ancient Phoenician city of Tyre made its name for the dye it famously produced: Tyrian purple. Making this dye was an expensive and laborious process, and so only the wealthiest could afford it, hence the color’s historic association with status and power.

Latin’s purpura is from the Ancient Greek, πορϕύρα (porphyra), similarly naming “purple” in color, cloth, and shellfish. Etymologists suspect the Greek word is ultimately loaned from a Semitic source.

Citing the use of purple to describe the sea, philologist Walter Skeat suggests purple is formed from a Greek verb meaning “to stir up,” as in the waters of a wine-dark ocean amid the purple-dark clouds of a storm. Skeat’s explanation is a bit of etymological purple prose, however; this expression for “excessively ornate writing” we can ultimately credit to the Roman poet Horace.

While Skeat’s theory for purple washes right out, his reference to “wine-dark seas” in Homeric verse is still significant in the story of color words. The story is a truly fascinating one, involving the astonishingly late development of blue, that ubiquitous color of sea and sky, in language. I’ll leave its telling to the radio show and podcast, Radiolab: “Why Isn’t the Sky Blue?”

For more on color words on this blog, enjoy earlier posts on orange and scarlet. And for more on dyes, see my post on shellac.

The association between the artist’s name and purple’s royal past certainly suggest a reason Prince so branded himself with the color. But perhaps there are other explanations, too. As an artist, Prince blends (and bends) so many genres into his music, so many identities into his persona. Perhaps like purple, a color that blends red and blue. Or purple, whose history blends both the high and low, worn by god-like kings but worked out of the sea.

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Music and monarchs: ‘royal’ roots

Yesterday was a big day for royal titles – in some ways glad, in other ways very sad. Queen Elizabeth reached a momentous 90 while Prince shockingly passed away at 57. Both, it turns out, live up to the etymologies of their names, in a manner of speaking.

Queen

At 90, Queen Elizabeth II is the UK’s longest-serving monarch, her rule spanning over 63 years. The word queen, however, has been reigning in the English language for much, much longer.

We have evidence of queen in several Old English manuscripts, where the word appears as cwēn, among other forms. French had a significant impact on Middle English, as we see often on this blog; in this case, it influenced the substitution of qu– for cw– to spell [kw].

Queen is very old, but its meaning has been largely constant, long referring to a “female ruler.” However, as the early record indicates, a queen also named a “woman,” especially a “wife,” suggesting a yet original sense.

A variant form, quean, is also cited in Old English (cwene) for “woman.” While queen was elevated in rank in the language, quean was demoted: the latter went on to name a “hussy” or “prostitute.” The record documents this very important distinction – in sound, spelling, and sense – early on.

Queen and quean have widespread Indo-European cognates. Of particular interest is Greek’s γυνή (gyne), “woman,” which English employs in such words as misogyny and gynecology. The Irish bean sídhe, meanwhile, yields banshee, literally “woman of the elves.” Bean is the queen, here. The Proto-Indo-European root of concern is *gwen–, “woman.” 

We see various extensions of queen come Middle English. By the late 1300s, a queen was a general term of endearment for an “honorable woman,” while a century later it stood for the “preeminent woman in a group.” As the chess piece, by 1450s, initially the weakest piece before rule changes coronated her. As the card suit, by the late 1500s. Bees, by the early 1600s; men, of course, originally assumed the queen bee was a he. Quean has long disparaged women; queen disparages a “homosexual man” by the 1890s, though anticipated earlier and perhaps influenced by quean. The Washington Post uses drama queen in 1923.

Elizabeth’s biographer Lord Hurd famously christened the Queen as “the Steadfast,” a suitable title, too, for the long and largely consistent etymology of queen.

Prince

Fans of Prince will certainly agree with the etymology of the icon’s forename. The word ultimately derives from the Latin princeps, an adjective that literally means “taking the first place,” hence “foremost” or “chief.”  Princeps joins prīmus (“first”) and a root of capere, “to take.” (Princeps then came to the English via French.)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Augustus took on the unofficial title princeps when he became emperor of Rome. This was an effort to appear more republican and less regal, as princeps figured in titles such as princeps cīvitātis, “first person of the city.”  

As its Roman record anticipates, prince once wielded yet more power than it already does in modern-day English: a prince was once in fact a “king.” Evidenced in the early 1200s, a prince was more generally a “sovereign ruler” or “person of chief authority,” largely, though not exclusively, male. As the OED explains, prince named the former rulers of Wales’ various states by the end of the 1200s. This started the tradition of titling the heir-apparent of the English monarch as the “Prince of Wales” – and thereby fixing the word to the eldest son of the king or queen, as we now know the word. The OED notes that other European languages followed suit in so narrowing prince.

Other notable princes include the Prince of Peace, applied to Jesus Christ by 1375. His counterpart, the Prince of Darkness, was formerly known as the Prince of this World, which, perhaps curiously, predates Prince of Peace by at least 50 years.

Principle and principal are derived from Latin’s princeps. The former is from Latin’s principium, literally a “first part,” and developed into “fundamental belief” or “foundational basis.” Principals have been bringing naughty students into their offices in public schools since 1827 (as “college president,” much earlier); the Latin principalis, “first in importance,” explains the English term.

While it’s easy to mistake principle and principal, there’s certainly no mistaking that Prince was truly a king of pop music. (Prince and Michael Jackson will just have to hash it out in the heavens.)

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Beyond the etymological “pale”

Today, my wife and I are bidding farewell to Southern California to greet our new home: Dublin, Ireland. We’ll actually be staying in Oxford, England first until the Irish government finishes processing our work visas.

(Nope, it’s not the sun, I’m sure you’re wondering: I’m going to miss fish tacos the most. And family, of course.)

So, to mark the occasion, I wanted to take a break from my regular newsy musings to look into the history of a word long associated with my new home – and really only surviving the expression beyond the pale.

Pale

In the English of the late 1300s, a pale was a “stake,” the wooden sort driven into the ground – or impaled into Dracula’s heart. Stakes can make a “fence,” a fence can mark a “boundary,” and a boundary can demarcate a “territory,” as pale all came to name.

Historically, England controlled a number of regions known as the English pale. The earliest pale in the record encompassed modern-day Calais, France; the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates this to the 1450s. About a century later, the English pale also included southern Scotland – and, most notoriously, the greater Dublin, Ireland area. This territory became known simply as the Pale. (Imperial Russia later had a Pale, too, which confined where Jews could live.)

Many claim beyond the pale referred to the ‘wild’ regions outside of English jurisdiction in Ireland, hence the expression’s meaning of “outside the bounds of acceptable behavior.” The OED, however, does not actually date the phrase – first attested in “beyond the pale of expedience” – until 1720. This is significantly later than the pale’s Irish reference, making this origin story a rather contemptuous bit of folk etymology.

So, beyond the pale is metaphorical – and has been. In the 1480s, Caxton, who brought the printing press to England, used pale in translation for a professional “domain” or “field.” (Caxton was referencing monks and abbots, it so happens.) We might think of beyond the pale as, originally, “out of one’s area of expertise.”

English ultimately drove pale into its ground from the Latin pālus, a “stake.” The ancient Romans also used a pālus as a wooden sword to practice fighting – and, imitating an enemy soldier, as a post in the ground to practice their fighting on. English derives impale, palisade, and pole from the root. Travail and travel –  appropriately enough, at least for the latter, so we’re hoping – are also related, but those origins are beyond the pale of this post.

Pale, as in pale skin, is not related, though my own complexion will soon lose much of its Southern California sunburn, thankfully, in its new climes.

Now, etymologists think Latin’s pālus is ultimately formed from the verb pangere, “to fix,” as one fixes a pale into the ground. Incredibly, this verb also yields peace, rooted in the sense of a pact fastening two parties together.

“Fastened together”: that, I think, aptly describes my wife and me as we venture into our new pales, so to speak, in a country whose rich linguistic traditions will certainly inspire many a Mashed Radish post ahead.

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“Feisty”: you can blame it on the dog

As many are describing it, last night’s debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in Brooklyn, New York was “feisty.”

I’ve read others characterize the candidates’ sharp exchanges as a “dogfight” and full of “hot air,” but these descriptions are just as “feisty,” if we look to the surprising etymology of this word.

Into the woods

While the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) first attests feisty in American English in 1896, an early usage in Horace Kephart’s 1913 book, Our Southern Highlanders, is telling: “’Feisty’… ‘means when a feller’s allers wigglin’ about, wantin’ ever’body to see him, like a kid when the preacher comes.’”

Kephart’s attention-seeking usage of feisty anticipates “fussy” and “fidgety,” an early meaning of  fidgety we might owe to the Appalachian culture of the Smoky Mountains, where his novel is set. Today, the “lively” and “aggressive” feisty still expresses this excitability, though the word has since evolved to focus on a kind of readiness to fight – and, if my ears are any measure, is said of women more than men. In his slang lexicography, Jonathon Green indeed records feisty as 20th-century U.S. slang for a “flirtatious, showy, and unscrupulous woman,” which also, perhaps, calls back Kephart’s early usage.

Barking up the etymological tree

For the etymology of feisty, we need to travel farther south, where a feist named a “small dog used in hunting small game (such as squirrels),” as the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary explains. The United Kennel Club, among others, officially registers the treeing feist and mountain feist today.

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This mountain feist is on the hunt. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Other variants of feist include fist, fice, fyce, and even foist, if we look to a 1770 reference by George Washington. In March of that year, George Washington wrote in his diary: “Countess a hound bitch after being confind got loose and was lined before it was discovered by my Water dog once and a small foist looking yellow cur twice.”

I find it reassuring to know that even America’s legendary first president couldn’t completely control his dogs.

Leashed up on feist, of course, was English’s prolific adjectival suffix, -y.

In spite of their size, small dogs like feists have big personalities. Their quick energy, sharp barks, and often skittish behavior indeed suggest the kind of lively, aggressive temperament we associate with feisty. And, returning to Kephart,  feisty also evokes the squirmy restlessness, say, of a terrier less interested in one’s lap than what’s out the window.

As for the indie artist Feist, the moniker comes from her last name. Her first name is Leslie.

Send the dog out back

Now, feist takes its name from a fisting hound, dog, or cur, evidenced as early as the 1530s. Get your mind out of the gutter, but not completely: This fist, a verbal adjective, means “to break wind.”

The OED documents this fist in the 15th century, referring to the action – and aftermath of – flatulence. A fisting dog, then, was “stinky,” but not, as the record suggests, because it needed a bath.

Jonathon Green notes two historic explanations for why this flatulent fist became associated with dogs: Wentworth and Flexner’s American Slang Dictionary  maintain “the dog was so named because one’s own smells could be blamed on it,” while in the 19th century  it was suggested that “such dogs were not much bigger than a man’s fist.”

It’s unclear whether the “clenched hand” fist is actually related to “broken wind” fist, though the OED does cross-reference the former in the latter’s etymology.

For the deeper origins of fist, etymologists hypothesize an Old English verb *fistan and noun *fist, with widespread cognates in Germanic languages and a root in the Proto-Germanic *fistiz. Some philologists actually connect fist to its still-lingering counterpart fart through a root, *perd-, which is really just a Proto-Indo-European fart noise. (We can also thank this root for partridge, whose windy winging  I’ve discussed at Oxford Dictionaries).

Like fart, I suspect fist is ultimately a Germanic onomatopoeic whoopee cushion, so to speak. But whatever origin we ultimately blame fist on, I can’t blame you for, er, leaving the room when the TV debates get too feisty this long and heated presidential campaign season.

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Terabyte: a “monstrous” amount of data

Last week, the Panama Papers leaked 2.6 terabytes of data. That adds ups to 11.5 million confidential documents about the secret, and potentially scandalous, offshoring of wealth across the globe. That’s a lot of information. You might even call it a “monstrous” amount, if you look to the origin of the prefix tera–. 

Monsters and marvels 

While the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) first attests terabyte in 1982, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially adopted the scientific prefix tera-, or tira- in its original French, in 1947. As the OED cites: “The following prefixes to abbreviations for the names of units should be used to indicate the specified multiples or sub-multiples of these units: T tira- 1012 ×.” One of the earliest usages, as far as I can tell, is teracycle, in reference to some very fast frequencies.

The IUPAC also gave the temporary names to some newly discovered elements, including ununtrium and ununpentium, as I discussed earlier this year.

To acknowledge the sheer size of this prefix quantifies, IUPAC scientists looked to a Greek word: τέρας, or teras. According to Liddell and Scott’s Greek dictionary,  the ancient Greek teras had two main meanings: 1) a “sign,” “wonder,” or “marvel,” as of the heavens; and 2) a “monster,” like a  giant serpent of the sea. The connecting sense appears to be “awe-inspiring size.”

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The Modern Greek edition of Disney’s The Beauty and the Beast translates “beast” with our focal Greek word,  teras. Image from greekshops.com.

We see a similar sense development in a prodigy, which, as in its original Latin prodigium, named both a “portent” and a “monster.” Perhaps we can imagine the ancients – and ourselves – trying to make meaning out out of some sublime but terrifying storm or creature, as Edmund Burke philosophized.

Tera-ble words 

English, as did Ancient Greek, used tera- (or its genitive τερατ-, terat-) as a combining form to make new words. Apparently a nonce usage, English scholar John Spencer used teratoscopy, or “augury from prodigies,” in his 1665 Discourses Concerning Prodigies, as the OED records. We see a teratology, a “tale about something marvelous,” in Edwards Phillips’s 1678 New World of Words, an early English dictionary. By the 1720s, something teratical “resembled a monster.”

By 1842, biologists applied teratology to the “study of physiological abnormalities,” which reminds us that we once referred to such conditions as “monstrosities.” Terata, teratogen, teratoma, and teratogenesis developed as other scientific terms referring to various physiological abnormalities.

For Indo-European scholars, the Greek teras has its lexical lair in the Proto-Indo-European *kwer-, “to make.” The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (AHD) cites cognates in the Sanskrit karma (literally “something made,” hence an “act”) as well as the very word Sanskrit (“well-formed”). Barnhart’s etymological dictionary, among others, cites Balto-Slavic relatives meaning “sorcery” and “spell.”

What is the sense development from “make” to “monster”? As the AHD suggests, a monster can “make” harm – or cause destruction.

Super-sized storage

Terabytes aren’t the only “monsters” terrorizing computer technology. The giga- in gigabyte is also borrowed from the Greek. Here, γίγας, or gigas, originally one of the superhuman “giants” the Olympian gods overthrew. English ultimately gets its word giant from this Greek root. Like terabyte, giga- was adopted by the IUPAC in 1947, this prefix signifying 109, an order of magnitude of one billion.

According to some accounts,  computer scientist Werner Buchholz coined byte in 1956. A byte contains 8 bits of digital information; bit is shortened from binary digit. Byte apparently, nods to this bit and plays with bite  (appropriately enough for this discussion of monsters). Megabyte appears by 1965, kilobyte by 1970, if the OED is any measure.

Clearly, as computer memory increased, so did the need for ever-larger prefixes, hence the super-sized gigabyte and terabyte of the 1980s. (And up from a terabyte is a petabyte, but I’m not going to take that bait.)

A terabyte is indeed a “monstrous” amount of data. But the real monsters, many fear, are lurking in the shadowy, financial underworld of the offshore accounts, shell companies, and tax havens the Panama Papers may just bring to light.

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Apostolic what?: It should be Greek to you

At least from what I’ve seen, most news outlets are referring to it as a “document.” Urging priests to show more compassion towards gay, divorced, and unmarried Catholics, Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia, or “The Joy of Love,” is technically called a “post-synodal apostolic exhortation,” a name almost as long as its 250-plus pages.

A post-synodal apostolic exhortation is a strong advisement (“exhortation”) issued by the pope (“apostolic”) after bishops have gathered to discuss a particular theme (“post-synodal”), here, the contemporary family in the Catholic church. Such a pronouncement does not officially change Church doctrine.

Is that Greek to you? Well, the actual words are, mostly.

Exhortation

Exhortation, or “admonishment” or “incitement,”  ultimately derives from the Latin exhortāri, which joins ex-, here an intensive prefix meaning “thoroughly,” and hortāri, “to encourage.”

The Oxford English Dictionary first cites exhortation in 1382 in Wycliffe’s Bible, which may suggest the word has long carried a religious weight. The verb form is documented about a century later, though a French variant, enhort, is recorded in Wycliffe’s Bible.

Hortatory, if you want some encouragement in your vocabulary, is a fancy way to describe something that provides exhortation.

Apostolic

Apostolic is an adjective form of “apostle.” The word has long been associated as one of the Four Marks of the Church, first issued in 381 in the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one, holy, catholic, apostolic church.”

In the creed, apostolic essentially means that the church continues on from the Twelve Apostles. Pope Francis is the Bishop of Rome, who, as Catholics believe, ultimately succeeds St. Peter, the first pope and representative of Jesus Christ on earth.

So, St. Peter was an apostle but also the first pope, hence apostolic also refers to “the successor of St. Peter,” or “papal.” The OED indeed first cites this meaning of apostolic in a 1477 published by Caxton, who first brought the printing press to England.

The earliest form of apostle is actually apostol, found as early as the 900s in reference to the Twelve Apostles. We owe the modern form, apostle, to a subsequent French borrowing in Middle English.

Apostle is a Greek word: ἀπόστολος (apostolos) was a “messenger,” “ambassador,” or “envoy,” literally “one sent forth.” According to Christian tradition, Christ “sent forth” his apostles to preach his gospel. At  root is ἀποστέλλειν (apostellein), “to send away.” Apostellein sends a versatile prefix, apo- (“away”) off with stellein,  another a versatile word, meaning “to send.”

An epistle, or “letter,” is similarly formed in the Greek, but features instead epi -, a prefix here meaning “at.”

Synod

Synod is also a religious word from Greek. Since the late 14th century, a synod has been referring to various “assemblies” of clergy, as σύνοδος (synodos) so meant in Greek.

Let’s break apart this “meeting”: synodos brings together syn- (“together”) and hodos (a “way”). The latter is also featured in period, which I discussed in an older post on punctuation.

Latin borrowed the term from Greek, English from the Latin. Some 17th-century scientists applied synod to astronomical conjunctions.

In the Catholic Church, a synod usually refers to the Synod of Bishops, who assemble regularly, though sometimes urgently, from all over the world to advise the pope on important church matters. Synods in 2014 and 2015 were called to address the family, eventually yielding Francis’ Amoris Laetitia.

Universal (and European) language

Thanks in part to important translations of the Bible from Hebrew into Greek and to the development of the early spread of the Church in Greece, Catholic terminology brims with Greek terms. And, of course, many more Latin ones, too.

But, as far as his post-synodal apostolic exhortation is concerned, this pontiff is aiming for the more universal language of love – as well as in French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish, if we look to the other translations of Amoris Laetitia thus far released.

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Breaking open the “piggy bank”

The Panama Papers is a big leak pointing to some big names involved in some big money. Fortunately, at least for a little head like mine, some smart folks on the internet have been helping me understand this big news in some simpler terms: the piggy bank.

I’m not going to dive into the shell companies, tax evasion, or corruption associated with the secret offshore industry the Panama Papers is exposing, because, well, I got no further than piggy bank, thanks to the helpful explainers.

Where does this term piggy bank come from? I guess I’ll have to break it open and see what sort of etymological money is inside.

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This little piggy went to the market, I guess you could say. Image from www.freeimages.com/photo/piggy-bank-1428097.

“Piggy bank”: a lexical ledger 

A casual web search for the origins of piggy bank will yield various articles repeating a claim that piggy banks were originally made from pygg, a kind of “orange clay.” Through subsequent spelling and vowel changes in Middle English, this pygg evolved into the piggy associated with these “money boxes” today.

Hogwash. Mostly.

As far as the written record of piggy bank goes, here’s what we know. The earliest record of piggy bank is actually the American English pig bank, cited in the Jersey Journal in 1898. Etymologist Barry Popik points us to a particularly illustrative citation in a 1900 issue of The Oregonian: “The latest novelty — The Pig Bank. You have to kill the pig to get the money — 25c each.”

This early example indeed supports the classic concept of the piggy banks: They have to be broken apart to get the money slipped into its one-way slot. Aversion to, or the inconvenience of, this requisite destruction, so it goes, encouraged savings, as well as perhaps deterred theft.

Now, piggy bank as such is evidenced by 1913 in The Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette, according to the OED: “She could see everything quite plainly now; her little room with the pink roses climbing up the wall, her box of toys, — “Teddy was up-side-down, poor Teddy,” — her desk with the piggy bank on top of it.”

The OED does document another sort of pig bank in the mid 19th century, though this one appears to be unrelated. This pig bank refers to a small bank supplied with money by a larger one. (Perhaps the operant metaphor is that the small bank is fattened up like a pig?)

Rolling in the mud?

As far as the record is concerned, the term piggy bank is a relatively recent phenomenon, but the savings device is much older. Archaeologists have discovered money boxes used in ancient Rome, in medieval China, and even in 14th-century Indonesia, whose money boxes even took the form of pigs.

But why should these coin containers be associated with pigs in the first place?

We don’t have evidence of the kind of orange pygg many internet articles cite, but we do have record of pig referring to various clay vessels. In Scottish and northern dialects of English, a pig has named an earthenware crockery (e.g., pitchers, jars) since the 15th century. And piggy as an adjective and noun for “earthenware” have been found in Scots in the 20th century.

For the origin of this pig, the OED ultimately admits its ignorance, but it does make some interesting suggestions. Perhaps it is related to piggin, a “wooden pail,” though earthen or metallic in some regions. Or perhaps it is connected to prig, a “small metal pitcher.”

The OED also cites an analog in the Scottish pirlie pig, which the dictionary attests by 1799. Here, the pirlie refers to “poking” a coin out of the pig, a kind of “clay pot.”

And, as a Middle English dictionary suggests, the earliest known reference to this pig as a “pygg of wine,” was so named because the container was made from pig skin. (Despite appearances, this pygg is not the “orange clay” your cursory Google queries will yield.)

Etymology must often heed Occam’s razor. Piggy might just be a transferred sense of pig, as in, yes, the animal. Smallish, round vessels made from flesh-colored clay? Sure, they sort of look like little oinkers. (As for the actual etymology of pig, see my piece over at Oxford Dictionaries on the curiously obscure origins of some common animal names.)

Swine lines   

So, let’s size things up: We have evidence of earthenware pigs in Middle English by the 1450s, Scottish pirlie pigs by the 1800s and piggies by 1950s, and American English pig bank and piggy bank by the 1900s. Record-wise, this is a pigsty.

As Michael Quinion suggest in his thoughtful discussion, we might well turn our attention away from lexical pigs to cultural ones for the origins of piggy bank. We find money boxes in various forms throughout early Europe, including in the form of pigs. Due to the food they provide and the farrow they birth, pigs became symbols of wealth, fertility, and luck, particularly in Germanic cultures. Immigrants, apparently, must have brought Sparschwein (a “saving pig”), for instance, to United States, where speakers applied a more literal label to this hog hoarder.

For as much as piggy banks may help someone like me understand the situation, the Panama Papers is evoking a different kind of pig symbolism: the greedy, capitalist kind.

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Why is it called “virtual” reality?

This week, Oculus VR released the Rift, the first virtual reality headset of its kind. But why is virtual reality called virtual? Let’s put on our, er, etymological goggles for this one; I promise it’ll be immersive. 

Virtue, mansplained

Today, we associate virtue with moral rectitude, often citing specific qualities like charity, patience, and temperance in contrast to vices like greed, gluttony, or taking selfies. English has been practicing this ethical virtue since the early 13th century, borrowing the word from the French vertu and the Latin virtus before that.

On a literal level, Latin’s virtus meant “manliness” or “manhood.” Indeed, at its root is vir, or “man.” The –tus was a noun-forming suffix, much like the very -hood we see in manhood. English derives the adjective virile from Latin’s vir. Viral and virulent are not related – by etymology, at least.

For its word for “man,” Old English used wer, a cognate of vir, which explains the were– in werewolf, literally a “man-wolf.” Wer is also related to world, a Germanic construct originally signifying a very anthropocentric planet Earth in “the age of man.”

The Irish fer or Welsh gwr are other notable relatives of vir and wer. For all this bromance, Indo-European scholars reconstruct the root *wi-ro, often used of warriors and slaves (i.e., captured warriors), itself derived from a base verb root meaning “to be vigorous,” as the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots explains.

The many virtues of virtue

For the ancient Romans, virtue also represented a traditionally heroic ideal. But they quickly extended virtus to encompass “strength” and “valor,” then generalized to “excellence,” “worth,” “quality,” or other special, inherent properties that gave something its “potency” or “efficacy.” French – and later, English – copied the vast and varied virtues of this word virtue.

When something has potency or efficacy, it has force, power, or authority. We might finish a marathon or dissertation – or this very blog post – by virtue of sheer willpower. This English expression actually translates a French expression, par la vertu de, or “by the power of,” often used in an official capacity.

By the 1400s, something virtual possessed virtue in that earlier sense of “power” or “efficacy.” As the Oxford English Dictionary  (OED) helpfully elucidates, something virtual was “inherently powerful or effective, owing to particular natural qualities.” Translating medieval Franciscan scholar Bartholomeus Anglicus’ encyclopedic De Proprietatibus Rerum, Cornish author John Trevisa provides English the earliest record with vertual, from Latin’s virtualis.

No easy virtue 

Now, in Latin, virtualis was often said of the healing properties, physical and spiritual, of drugs or medicines (derived from plants), which can help us understand the big metaphysical jump virtual takes. By the the mid-1400s, particularly in religious contexts, the OED explains virtual meant “in essence, potentiality, or effect, although not in form or actuality.”

Should we dust off our Aristotle? Something virtual is effective in essence but not in name, and this usage is all rooted in the idea of virtue as possessing a sort of innate, self-actualizing power. Within the acorn is the potential for the actual oak tree; the acorn, very broadly speaking, is a virtual oak tree.

After the Iowa Caucuses, to leave the philosophy classroom, Bernie Sanders declared his contest there with Hillary Clinton a “virtual tie.” Clinton technically won more votes, but the victory was so narrow that the two were, for all intents and purposes, even.

And if I say I’m “virtually broke,” I may have a hundred or two bucks in my checking account, but I can’t actually pay my all bills. I am not literally broke in name, but, really, I just don’t have enough money to get by. Hence, I’m virtually – or very nearly or essentially  – broke. The OED records this usage by the mid-1600s.

Scientists took to this virtual. At least by the end of the 1600s, they were variously applying it to special phenomena, particularly theoretical, rather than observed, in their discipline.

Virtual‘s reality

Centuries later, computer scientists found the term especially useful. In 1959, John Cocke and Harwood Kolsky presented a paper on virtual memory for an important computer conference in Boston. They described virtual memory as a way to increase computer speed. As in today’s computers, virtual memory increases a computer’s physical memory by temporarily using empty space on the hard drive as if it were real. This memory is additional memory in essence, hence virtual.

In 1979, as the OED documents, IBM used virtual reality as we now know it in a programming announcement: “A base to develop an even more powerful operating system,…designated ‘Virtual Reality’…to enable the user to migrate to totally unreal universes.” If Oculus VR has its way, these universes will be not unreal but all too real. That is, if you can your hands on one. I hear they’re virtually impossible to get.

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